Could you please do whatever it is you can tomorrow to ensure that I receive a bank draft for $155,000 USD asap ...

I need to get my money back ... sit back and reconsider this entire program again ...

I can’t scream or cry or anything ...

PLEASE PLEASE help me.

I am not ok.

Chapter One: Invest

Many investors who joined Calgary’s Institute For Financial Learning were chasing a dream.

For some, that dream meant the promise of new riches and financial freedom.

For Kelowna realtor Edna Coulic, who was in her early 40s, it meant taking care of her mom as she eased into her golden years.

Coulic was also smart.

Rather than depend solely on her income to achieve these goals, she invested in property, currency markets and stock. She wasn’t going to be one of those people who counted on lottery tickets for her retirement.

In 2006, a friend first let Coulic in on an opportunity that promised to teach people about the secrets of wealth. Coulic signed up with the Institute For Financial Learning (IFFL).

Unwittingly, she invested in what police say is a Ponzi scheme.

And that wasn’t the biggest price she would pay.

Coulic’s family blames her death last year on the fallout of her experience. A series of e-mails between Coulic and her IFFL contacts, obtained by the Herald, gives new insight into those struggles.

Coulic is just one of thousands of North Americans that Mounties say put money into a complex investment hoax allegedly orchestrated by two Calgary businessmen, Milowe Brost and Gary Sorenson.

Police say the scheme took place between 1999 and last year, and spanned several continents.

Through court records, interviews and newly obtained videos, the Herald has tracked the financial odyssey from a Honduran gold factory to a world-famous resort, and from a sterile RCMP interview room to Edna Coulic’s home.

The seeds of the business were planted when a group of men, including Brost, met over coffee in 1999.

They talked about the idea of an offshore finance company, according to an RCMP court filing, and discussed a firm called Anderson’s Ark, which two years later would see its leaders arrested in the U.S. on multiple tax, fraud and conspiracy charges.

For the Calgary businessmen, events came to a head with the arrest of Brost and Sorenson in September.

Mounties allege the two men created a business, Syndicated Gold Depository SA, which then agreed to lend money to Sorenson’s firm, Merendon Mining Corp. Ltd., a Calgary-based firm that operated in Honduras.

Attractive rates of return, along with promises of potential tax advantages, were used to entice investors into eventually placing their money into offshore shell companies, investigators say.

Mounties believe nominees were put in place by Brost and Sorenson to run the shell companies, which were then marketed by Brost’s firms — Capital Alternatives Inc. and the Institute For Financial Learning, Group of Companies Inc.

The two men now face a long legal battle against accusations of theft and fraud.

None of the allegations have been proven. Both men have declined to comment on the specific allegations, although in September, Sorenson told the Herald: “Has anybody ever asked the question or made the assumption that maybe I’m innocent?”

Still, police contend that it all amounted to a Ponzi-style scheme which depends on an influx of new investors, instead of profits, to pay out existing investors.

This year, disgraced U.S. financier Bernie Madoff plead guilty in March to swindling many of America’s well-to-do out of billions of dollars through a Ponzi scheme, one of many uncovered by authorities in the past year.

Mounties allege the Calgary scheme bilked investors out of as much as $400 million, making it the biggest — and one of the most complex — scams of its kind in Canadian history.

The arrests were the culmination of nearly four years of police work on a file code-named “Project Netals.”

“In my 14 years investigating commercial crime, Project Netals is one of the largest, most complex investigations in which I have had involvement,” Supt. Eric Mattson wrote in a court affidavit this year.

But amid some 60 boxes containing 104,000 pages of evidence, the plight of the victims was never far from mind, says Staff Sgt. Scott Fuller, the Mountie who led the case for more than two years.

“I thought about it every day because the more I was getting into it, the more you were seeing stories where the kids invested, then they brought the parents in and they invested, then grandparents,” says Fuller.

“I knew it had the potential to completely financially wipe out entire families.”

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Herald Special Report: An investor's road to ruin in alleged Ponzi scheme

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